Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize recreational marijuana this week after Gov. Tim Walz signed the bill into law Tuesday. The law goes into effect Aug. 1.
URL Media partner Sahan Journal reported that those in attendance cheered jubilantly as Walz signed the bill.
“What we know right now is prohibition doesn’t work,” Walz said. “We’ve criminalized a lot of folks.”
That “criminalization,” as Walz described it, began in earnest in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan took office and brought the war on drugs to the White House.
“In 1977 the DEA had acknowledged that decriminalization was a policy worth considering; three years later it called marijuana the most urgent drug problem facing the United States,” Eric Schlosser wrote in this 1994 piece for The Atlantic.
Congress, following the Reagan Administration’s lead, passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendment Act of 1998, all of which increased federal penalties for possession, cultivation and trafficking of marijuana.
But, as with most criminalization efforts in the U.S., communities of color were the most impacted.
According to a 2020 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Black people were three times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than white people, despite similar rates of use, between 2010-2018. Even in states that legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession, the ACLU found that Black people were still more likely to be arrested than white people.
So what can Minnesota do to address the harms perpetuated by prior criminalization of marijuana?
State Sen. Lindsey Port (DFL-Burnsville), who co-authored the bill, said the new law would look at reinvesting in communities harmed by marijuana prohibition.
More: Sahan Journal has a breakdown of the law’s other key measures here.
According to Sahan Journal, the law allows for the automatic expungement of all prior marijuana possession misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors in the state. It also requires creating a panel to consider the expungement of prior gross misdemeanors and felonies related to marijuana possession and sales.
By expunging people’s criminal records of marijuana offenses, it allows them to move forward with their lives enabling them to secure gainful employment, adequate housing, and even take part in the legal marijuana market, URL Media partner Prism reported in 2020.
“Low-level marijuana offenders and those convicted of drug-related felonies are generally barred from the opportunity to work in the cannabis industry due to histories of drug use or trafficking,” Miranda Perez wrote.
Perez spoke with Chicago native Erick Nunez, then 30, who started selling weed at the age of 16. He was sentenced to probation three times for possessing marijuana and then was incarcerated for selling crack cocaine. On his fourth charge, he was convicted and sentenced to three years behind bars.
This resulted in him being barred from participating in Illinois’ legal marijuana industry, because even though the state has an initiative to expunge the records of those arrested for possession of less than an ounce, that process takes time.
With news out of Minnesota this week, let’s hope the process will go more smoothly for those in the state.
